Turnover-Based Storage in Non-Traditional Unit-Load Warehouse Designs

We investigate the effect of assigning the most-active items to the best locations in unitload warehouses with non-traditional aisles. Specifically, we report the performance of flying-V and fishbone designs when products exhibit different velocity profiles. We consider both singleand dual-command operations in a warehouse where receiving and shipping are located at the midpoint of one side of the warehouse. For dualcommand operations, a fishbone design shows similar reductions in travel distances for both random and turnover-based storage policies. The fishbone designs that provide the best performance have a diagonal cross aisle that extends to the upper corners of the picking space, and are approximately half as tall as they are wide. In general, warehouse design parameters that perform best under random storage also perform well under turnover-based storage.